Wednesday, 7 November, 2018 UTC

Summary

Hold on to your seat! This is a deep dive on improving time-to-interactive for Netflix.com on the desktop. Addy Osmani writes on the Dev Channel for the Chromium dev team regarding performance tuning of Netflix.com. They were trying to determine if React was truly necessary for the logged-out homepage to function.

Even though React’s initial footprint was just 45kB, removing React, several libraries and the corresponding app code from the client-side reduced the total amount of JavaScript by over 200kB, causing an over-50% reduction in Netflix’s time-to-interactivity for the logged-out homepage.

There’s more to this story, so dig in. Or, share your comments on their approach to reducing time-to-interactivity and if you might have done things differently.